Pathfinders of the West eBook

had been done in return for the charter. France
had never ceased seeking the mythical Western Sea
that was supposed to lie just beyond the Mississippi;
and when French buccaneers destroyed the English Company’s
forts on the bay, the English ambassador at Paris
exacted such an enormous bill of damages that the
Hudson Bay traders were enabled to build a stronger
fortress up at Prince of Wales on the mouth of Churchill
River than the French themselves possessed at Quebec
on the St. Lawrence. What—­asked the
rivals of the Company in London—­had been
done in return for such national protection?
France had discovered and explored a whole new world
north of the Missouri. What had the English done?
Where did the Western Sea of which Spain had possession
in the South lie towards the North? What lay
between the Hudson Bay and that Western Sea?
Was there a Northwest passage by water through this
region to Asia? If not, was there an undiscovered
world in the North, like Louisiana in the South?
There was talk of revoking the charter. Then
the Company awakened from its long sleep with a mighty
stir.

The annual boats that came out to Hudson Bay in the
summer of 1769 anchored on the offing, six miles from
the gray walls of Fort Prince of Wales, and roared
out a salute of cannon becoming the importance of
ships that bore almost revolutionary commissions.
The fort cannon on the walls of Churchill River thundered
their answer. A pinnace came scudding over the
waves from the ships. A gig boat launched out
from the fort to welcome the messengers. Where
the two met halfway, packets of letters were handed
to Moses Norton, governor at Fort Prince of Wales,
commanding him to despatch his most intrepid explorers
for the discovery of unknown rivers, strange lands,
rumored copper mines, and the mythical Northwest Passage
that was supposed to lead directly to China.

The fort lay on a spit of sand running out into the
bay at the mouth of Churchill River. It was
three hundred yards long by three hundred yards wide,
with four bastions, in three of which were stores and
wells of water. The fourth bastion contained
the powder-magazine. The walls were thirty feet
wide at the bottom and twenty feet wide at the top,
of hammer-dressed stone, mounted with forty great
cannon. A commodious stone house, furnished
with all the luxuries of the chase, stood in the centre
of the courtyard. This was the residence of the
governor. Offices, warehouses, barracks, and
hunters’ lodges were banked round the inner
walls of the fort. The garrison consisted of
thirty-nine common soldiers and a few officers.
In addition, there hung about the fort the usual
habitues of a Northern fur post,—­young clerks
from England, who had come out for a year’s
experience in the wilds; underpaid artisans, striving
to mend their fortunes by illicit trade; hunters and
coureurs and voyageurs, living like Indians
but with a strain of white blood that forever distinguished
them from their comrades; stately Indian sachems,
stalking about the fort with whiffs of contempt from
their long calumets for all this white-man luxury;
and a ragamuffin brigade,—­squaws, youngsters,
and beggars,—­who subsisted by picking up
food from the waste heap of the fort.